A Curious Beginning

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  He swore softly. “Whatever you think you may know about Ireland, forget it. I have told you I cannot say more, but yes, Mr. de Clare and his friends are Irish, and you must give them a wide berth if you wish to live long enough to celebrate your next birthday.” He turned anguished eyes to Stoker. “You must make her see reason. Get her safely out of the country.”

  Stoker shrugged. “I cannot even persuade her to stay in the house. What makes you think I can force her to leave the country?”

  I put a quelling hand to Stoker’s arm. “Do not alarm Mr. Mornaday, Stoker. Can you not see he is aggrieved on our behalf? And we owe him so much already.” The helmsman brought us gently up to the little landing, and Mornaday handed us onto the dock before pointing out the quickest route to a main thoroughfare.

  I extended my hand to him. “Thank you for your many kindnesses. I hope if we meet again it will be under very different circumstances,” I told him. He saluted and the little boat slipped away as swiftly as it had come, nimbly dodging the larger craft upon the water as it made its way upriver.

  Stoker turned to me with an expression of frank skepticism. “You are not actually thinking of leaving the country.” It was not even a question, and I gave a little sigh of pleasure that he was beginning to know me so well.

  “Of course not. But why give Mr. Mornaday something to worry about? He seems such a nice fellow.”

  “A nice fellow!” Stoker snorted. “He bribed people I once considered friends to give information about us—a deed that will not go unpunished.”

  “Something to save for a rainy day,” I promised him. “In the meantime, we must return to Bishop’s Folly and get into some dry clothes and apply ourselves to the mystery at hand. We have much to talk about.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In spite of Mornaday’s blithe assurances that we should easily secure a cab, we walked some distance before finding an empty hansom whose driver seemed entirely incurious about taking up two bedraggled passengers. Stoker gave him the address of Bishop’s Folly and we settled against the seat quite close together—for warmth rather than from any more affectionate motivation.

  After a moment, Stoker began to smile.

  “What is so funny?” I demanded.

  “You. I never imagined you would actually understand my signal.”

  “You mean your melodramatic attempts at Morse code by drumming your fists on the deck? It’s a wonder every boatman on the Thames didn’t understand it.”

  He rolled his eyes heavenward. “Forgive me for failing to find a more subtle means of informing you of my intentions, but I was improvising. I’ve never been abducted before. I shall do better next time.”

  I gave an unladylike snort of laughter. “I think we managed, all things considered. And for a first-timer at abduction, you did very well indeed.”

  His gaze narrowed. “Veronica, have you been abducted before?”

  I waved an airy hand, thinking of my intemperate Corsican friend and a few rather delicate situations in Sarawak and Mexico. “Oh, heaps of times.”

  He opened his mouth to speak but thought better of it, and we journeyed back to Bishop’s Folly in soggy silence.

  I was surprised to find upon reaching the Belvedere how quickly the place had come to seem like a home of sorts—borrowed, temporary, but a home nonetheless. I stoked the fire in the snug and put the kettle on while Stoker rummaged about and unearthed a bit of slender rope. He secured one end to a caryatid’s wrist and the other to a narwhal’s tusk, fashioning a makeshift and rather exotic clothesline. I made first use of the little domestic office to tidy myself and was just hanging my things upon the clothesline to dry when Stoker emerged from his own efforts, toweling his hair, his shirt opened loosely at the throat.

  “All of my sweets, at the bottom of the Thames,” he grumbled. I rummaged among the tins of provisions and found a bit of honeycomb candy. The pieces were stuck together, but he occupied himself happily in breaking them apart and when he put the first piece into his mouth, he closed his eyes and sighed in unadulterated pleasure.

  I took an inventory of all that I had lost. “A hatpin, my violet hat, and Lady Cordelia’s revolver, all gone,” I mourned. But my little velvet mouse had survived the dunking. I had placed him in a warm and discreet spot next to the stove whilst Stoker had been occupied drying himself. Naturally, I did not think of Chester as a child’s keepsake; he was a mascot of sorts and nothing more, but Stoker would no doubt make a fuss and I was in no mood to be laughed at.

  I was annoyed enough to find my compass had been thoroughly wetted, and I dried it carefully, clucking as I turned it this way and that in an effort to get the arrow to move.

  “Blast. I think the water has got inside and ruined it,” I muttered.

  Stoker came to my side and peered over my shoulder. “Let me. I do like to tinker a bit,” he said, taking the compass from me. “Where did you get this?”

  “Aunt Lucy. She told me it would always show me the way home again, and I have worn it every day since.”

  He turned it this way and that, examining it thoroughly. “An expensive piece. Heavy for its size.”

  “Well, Aunt Lucy was like that—if she had a tuppence, she would rather spend it on a flower than bread. Aunt Nell was just the opposite, practical to a fault. She deplored Aunt Lucy’s spendthrift ways. In fact, she hated that compass, no doubt because it was expensive.”

  “Hated it?” he asked, but his voice was detached, his focus entirely upon the piece he held.

  “Yes, I was wearing it the first time I came into her room after her apoplexy. She looked at it and was so enraged, the doctor had to give her an injection of morphia to settle her down. I did not wear it in front of her again so as not to upset her.”

  “Interesting,” he murmured. He raised it to his ear and shook it hard.

  “Stoker! What are you doing? You will ruin it,” I protested.

  He held it to my ear. “Listen.” He gave another shake and I heard a faint but unmistakable rattle.

  “What on earth—”

  I put out my hand for the compass, running my thumb along the side. For the first time I noticed a seam at the edge. The day’s events had loosened it a little, and one bit stood just proud of the rest. I tried to slip a fingernail behind it.

  “Too thick,” I muttered. Stoker retrieved the knife from the lanyard he had put aside when he changed his clothes. “Try this.”

  I slid the finely honed edge under the seam and gave a gentle push. It popped free so suddenly I nearly dropped the entire thing. Wedged tightly into the back of the compass was a key. I used the knife blade to pry it free.

  “Did either of the aunts leave you anything with a lock? A box? A small trunk?”

  “Nothing. Only this—a perfectly anonymous key,” I said in some frustration.

  “Not entirely anonymous,” he said, turning it over for my inspection. Along the length of the key were incised a series of letters. “BOLOXST,” I read aloud. “But what does it mean? It sounds like a rude word.”

  “I highly doubt your aunt would have given you a key with a variation of ‘bollocks’ on it. A surname, perhaps? Did you ever meet anyone of their acquaintance with that name?”

  “Boloxst? No, it’s a ridiculous notion. No one has ever been called Boloxst,” I said.

  “It does seem unlikely,” he agreed. “Perhaps it is an anagram.”

  We set to work with paper and pencils and an hour later gave it up as a blind alley. “I’ve nothing more interesting than ‘stool,’” I remarked. “Hardly illuminating.”

  “Indeed. If one were going to leave behind a keyhole, it would scarcely be in a stool. Perhaps it is a foreign name.”

  I peered at the letters again. “If one really concentrates, it looks almost Flemish.”

  “No,” he said flatly. “We’ve already got the Irish in
volved, thanks to the villainous Mr. de Clare. I will not tolerate Flemings as well.”

  “You are irritable, and heavens, I can see why! We haven’t eaten in hours and we’ve let the kettle boil dry.”

  Stoker took his turn at providing victuals and we ate cold meat and mustard on bread as we drank our tea. “Go over it again,” I instructed. “Everything we know.”

  “Your mother was an Irish actress who changed her name to pursue a career,” he began promptly.

  “Hold a moment. Perhaps there is something there. Her name before she changed it was de Clare. Do we know anything about the de Clares?”

  He shrugged. “Old family—in the Domesday Book just like the Templeton-Vanes. Some king or other sent them off to Ireland, and a branch has been there ever since.”

  I shook my head. “I do not understand. If she were a de Clare, then she—and my duplicitous uncle—would be nobility. What objection could my father’s family have to her as a bride?”

  “Her career. Actresses have gained a little in respectability since the days of the Restoration, but families like mine wouldn’t countenance one marrying in for a second. Besides, the de Clares have been in Ireland for centuries, breeding like rabbits. There are doubtless dozens of cadet lines which have come down quite far in the world. She mightn’t have been born any better than a merchant’s daughter or a farmer’s.” His eyes took on a speculative gleam. “You would have to ask your uncle. I should like to meet up with him again—I owe him a thrashing.”

  I gave him a repressive look and he shrugged. “Or you might try to trace her relations. Perhaps there are other siblings or even a grandparent still living.”

  “Absolutely not. I am not going to Ireland.”

  “Why not?”

  “Have you been to Ireland? The climate is appalling. Nothing but mist.”

  “What is your objection to mist?”

  I regarded him with the same disdain with which I had beheld my first Turkish toilet. “It is gloomy. Butterflies like the sun. Ireland is for the moth people.”

  “You are a lepidopterist,” he said repressively. “You are not supposed to discriminate against moths.”

  “I am entitled to my prejudices,” I replied before returning to the subject at hand. “Still, there seems little enough point in going to Ireland when the Irish have come to us. My uncle and his henchman are all Hibernian.” I paused, considering the peculiar green spice my uncle smelled of. “Why do you suppose my uncle chews caraway? I wonder what it signifies.”

  “That he has digestive issues,” Stoker supplied promptly. “Caraway seeds are a carminative. I have occasionally prescribed them to patients with an excess of wind.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yes,” he said, cutting me off sharply before I could finish the thought.

  “How unfortunate,” I murmured. I dared not meet his eyes for fear I would dissolve into laughter at the notion of an abductor who suffered from excessive wind. I primmed my mouth. “So, we have a mother and uncle and assorted miscreants from Ireland, where I was born. We assume that my mother left me in the care of the Harbottles, and they found it expedient to leave Ireland. But why? Who would profit from menacing an infant in those circumstances?”

  Our eyes met and we spoke in unison. “The father.”

  “I did not like to believe it, but perhaps you were right. It does have a certain pretty symmetry,” I observed. “We can assume my father was also Irish, perhaps better bred than my mother, perhaps from a conservative family. After my birth, he marries this other woman instead of my mother. Lily Ashbourne dies, possibly by his hand. Who, then, is left to tie him to her memory? His child. A loose end he must knot. Fearing him, the Harbottles flee Ireland and move constantly throughout my childhood, eluding him and the threat he poses.” I floundered. “Then what?”

  Stoker promptly picked up the thread. “He cannot find you. Perhaps he has come close throughout the years. Perhaps he has put men loyal to himself onto your trail. He may have collected a few clues. It is possible the Harbottles were less than careful when they ought to have been.”

  “The baron knew their assumed name, and we know he had a connection to my father,” I added. “My father may have discovered our whereabouts through him. The baron never knew where we were living, but when Aunt Nell died, I placed a notice in the London newspaper. I did not believe they had connections anywhere, but I wanted to make quite certain any possible debts were settled. That is how the baron found us.”

  We were silent a moment, both of us considering the implications.

  “I have thought of something else that might have kept them apart,” Stoker put in. “It might be that your mother was born to a respectable, even a wealthy family. But in Ireland, even money isn’t enough to span one unbridgeable divide.”

  “Religion,” I supplied.

  He gave a short nod. “Precisely. We know from the papers that your mother was a practicing Catholic. What if your father was a Protestant? Those resentments run deep.” That much was true. I had missed some of the more sensational headlines during my travels, but a quick perusal of the newspapers in Stoker’s workroom had enlightened me. It had been only two years since Irishmen detonated dynamite at the Tower and Westminster Hall, and shortly before there had been the Phoenix Park Murders—the fatal stabbings of the Chief Secretary for Ireland and his Permanent Undersecretary. The fact that the secretary had been a member of the powerful Cavendish family had not protected him. Even the royal family was not safe. An Irishman had come close to assassinating the queen’s own son in Australia not so many years before. And these were merely the most recent acts in centuries of violent conflict.

  I sighed. “I suppose it is not difficult to believe that a Protestant fellow from a good family would never dare marry a Catholic actress. He would be marked down as a traitor by his side, as would she. They should both be in danger, depending how deeply their families felt about Home Rule.” I dropped my head into my hands. “God, what a filthy muddle.”

  “And there might be more,” he said.

  I lifted my head to look him squarely in the eye. “I have this day been abducted, nearly drowned, and stabbed a man with a hatpin. I am unsinkable, Stoker. Do your worst.”

  “It did occur to me that your father might be in league with your uncle,” he said flatly. “And if that is the case, he might well be responsible for Max’s death.”

  I sputtered. “Impossible.”

  “You cannot say that,” he told me in a reasonable tone. “You do not know him.”

  “I know that it is highly illogical to think on the one hand my father might be responsible for Lily Ashbourne’s death and on the other that he might be conspiring with her brother!”

  He shrugged. “Illogical but not impossible. And we’ve no proof your father had anything to do with her death. For all we know, he was forced into the marriage and heartbroken at giving Lily up.”

  “Oh, make up your mind!” I slapped my palms to the table and thrust myself out of my chair.

  To his everlasting credit, he said nothing, letting me pace back and forth until I had run out my irritation. I gave a sigh of impatience and settled back into my chair.

  “Don’t pout,” Stoker warned. “Your face will settle into permanent creases of sulkiness.”

  “I am not sulking. I am thinking.” After a few minutes, I gave up. “Very well. You have a point. My father may or may not be a villain. He may or may not have played a part in my mother’s death. And he may or may not be implicated in the baron’s death. We have done nothing but make the waters murky, Stoker.”

  “I know.” He rubbed his temples. “We are scientists. It is our vocation to think critically and we have been going at this entirely backward.”

  I tipped my head. “You just admitted I am a scientist rather than a dilettante who chases pretty things with wings.”


  “You do chase pretty things with wings,” he returned. “You do not like the poor hairy moths.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I mightn’t like all of the moths, but some of them are quite resplendent. Hyalophora cecropia, for instance—”

  He raised a hand. “You needn’t justify yourself to me. As you say, we are entitled to our prejudices. I should be far happier to work upon a lioness than a vulture. We are mere humans, Veronica. We are destined to prefer beauty to ugliness.”

  His mouth twisted upon these last words, and I wondered if he was thinking of his own altered beauty and if he felt somehow diminished by it.

  Suddenly, I surged from my chair, this time in triumph. “I know what the inscription on the key means.”

  “What?” he demanded.

  “Where would you go to leave something of value?”

  “A bank,” was the prompt reply.

  “And what city are we in?”

  “London.” Understanding kindled in his face. “BOL. Bank of London.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And OXST?” His eyes lit and he gave me a grin. “Oxford Street branch.”

  I curled my hands into triumphant fists. “Yes! I know it is right. I know it.”

  “Veronica,” he said gently, “what do you hope to find there?”

  “Proof that my father did not harm my mother,” I replied. “Proof that he did. Something, anything that I can hold on to and know is real.”

  He gave me a searching look, then a grudging nod. “That I can understand.”

  “What did Mornaday mean when he spoke of your family history?” I asked.

  He considered his hands as he formed his answer. “Let us simply say that Inspector Mornaday knows things that are none of his business—things that ought to have been buried years ago.”

  “I should not have pried.”

  He gave me a ghostly smile. “It isn’t your knowing that I mind. It’s the telling.” I said nothing and after a moment he went on. “My family and I are not close. That is why I use only a variation of my given name rather than the name Lord Templeton-Vane gave me,” he told me with a curl of his lip. “I do not speak to them and they do not speak to me. It is better that way. Old sins are never forgot, but they may be packed away.”